JEUNE AFRIQUE,Editorial, “Sandstorm,” by François Sudan, Editor (PARIS, France, Oct. 8, 2012) — We have probably neither taken the full measure of – nor measured all the consequences – of the Malian implosion, whose origins lie as much in the staggering security negligence in the last years of the Amadou Toumani Toure regime as in the dispersion of Libyan arsenal.

As accurately described in a summary document on the situation in the Sahara, shared among several European and Maghreb intelligence services, which Jeune Afrique was made aware of, the control by Islamist groups in northern Mali has created a pull factor which has attracted hundreds of young recruits from the five countries of the Maghreb on a daily basis for more than six months.

The trip takes place overnight aboard a Toyota Land Cruiser via the routes broken in by drug and cigarette traffickers. A hiring bonus of 4,000 Euros is paid on arrival at Gao, Kidal or West Timbuktu, and the reasons that push these new jihadis into the war path are the same as those that drive illegal immigrants into the crammed pateras in the Mediterranean: social misery and the hope for Eldorado.

This lack of a future, this opaque horizon that generates all forms of madness, none feel it more than the young Sahrawis of the Polisario Front camps in the region of Tindouf who, for their whole life, have had only the tents in their camps in the Algerian desert as their roof.

This is the reason why we find an increasing number in the ranks of AQIM or Mujao. Trained in weapons, indoctrinated by Salafist imams who openly advocate in the camps for the creation of an Islamic State in Western Sahara, these fighters are welcomed with open arms by their Algerian brothers. Admittedly, as described in our document, the harmony among these different groups is far from permanent.

The history of the Islamist katibas of the Sahara is also comprised of kidnappings, ransoms, fratricidal clashes over sharing the unholy proceeds from hostage or hashish trafficking. However the recent outbreak in the heart of this terrorist network, which has nevertheless found its sanctuary, of desperados from the ranks of the last African guerrilla adds to the ambient dangerousness. Neither Morocco – which strengthened its security measures in the South for fear of attacks, nor Mauritania – which does what it can, with determination – nor Algeria can ignore this new reality.

Hence the obvious lack of understanding by its partners, African as well as European, vis a vis the latter. Why does Algiers, which holds one of the major keys to the solution, essentially military, to the terrorist Saharan threat refuse to use it? Why, when nothing concerning the Polisario escapes its notice, has this great country allowed the situation to degenerate to this level, especially since the Front’s leadership seems to have lost all control of its base?

Why is the Operational Committee of Joint Staff (CRIC), a mechanism designed in Algiers to confront the perils of AQIM, and which includes numerous Sahelian countries, strangely paralyzed, as if in hibernation, since the beginning of the Malian crisis? Even if, one day or another, it gives rise to unpleasant answers to these questions, it is time to emerge from the wait-and-see attitude. Each day that goes by brings closer the day when North Mali will no longer be retrievable.